


The rest of your life

by shittershutter



Category: Dunkirk (2017)
Genre: M/M, a metaphysical happy end I'd say, people do die but they die old and content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-21
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2019-04-25 22:43:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,077
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14388651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shittershutter/pseuds/shittershutter
Summary: Gibson is well into his fifties when he takes Tommy to his hometown."I swear to fucking god; it's like he was waiting for everyone to die off there," Tommy hisses into the receiver to the unsympathetic Alex on the other end as he is tangled in a short cord, throwing random items into the traveling bag.





	The rest of your life

**Author's Note:**

> Alright. I'm not necessarily done with the pairing, but I think I'm done with the huge fics about their life. I'm sure I'll be writing shorter stories.
> 
> But given that Tommy/Gibson's story is my most favorite story to write (and the most cohesive set of fics I've ever written) I've felt the need to give a general outline of their life story. 
> 
> I should say upfront that if you've cried reading anything I've written, you're going to bawl reading this. It's a light kind of sadness because ultimately I believe it's a happy end. People will die here but they will die old and content with the life they've lived.
> 
> I also would like to say a huge thank you for inspiring me to write more. I'm bad at commenting back but I appreciate your feedback, your support and you sharing my love for Tommy and Gibson. I seriously can't stress enough how I appreciate you all. Thank you. <3

Gibson is well into his fifties when he takes Tommy to his hometown.

"I swear to fucking god; it's like he was waiting for everyone to die off there," Tommy hisses into the receiver to the unsympathetic Alex on the other end as he is tangled in a short cord, throwing random items into the traveling bag. 

Gibson is still at work but there is a note on the kitchen table with two tickets underneath, and it merely says: "Pack." True to himself, the older man is even more short-spoken in writing. 

Tommy glances at the destination and chokes on his cigarette. He doesn't waste a second.

So they go, and Gibson doesn't say a word on the way there and seemingly stops to breathe also when they step into a picturesque countryside -- Tommy is a country boy himself, but this does make him feel like he is moving through a painting with impossibly beautiful shapes and bright colors around.

For years, Tommy's biggest fear of coming to France was to lose the man, to watch him turn away and dissolve into the crowd returning to where he belongs, leaving the younger man behind. 

In reality, Gibson dissolves like oil in water. His French sounds blurred around the edges now, like he is an Englishman with an impeccable grasp of the language, not someone who was born and raised in the country. 

The town was bombed into oblivion and then rebuilt anew, beautiful and crisp in its resilience but also unrecognizable to him. It is populated with the new people, children of those who could remember Gibson's face. Children of children, even. 

Gibson walks around like a ghost, returning to the townhall over and over as a starting point -- the old building is damaged in places but still sticks out of the main square like a giant middle finger. Tommy trails behind silently, sweating like a pig and treating the entire process with reverence, with the expectation of something magical and really eye-opening to happen. 

On their fourth circle around the main square, he notices the memorial plaque on the back of the building, a small collection of faded photographs under the glass, cracked but still cleaned lovingly by someone on a daily basis.

He knows he'll see Gibson there before he does, eyes scanning the dozens of faces, smiling and young.

He taps his nail against the glass, then circles the face he'd recognize everywhere. Gibson from before he knew him is smiling so brightly Tommy is jealous of all the dead people who knew him then, standing there among his friends with what looks like a summer festival blurred on the background. 

"There you are," Tommy smiles. Starts to, at least, because then the corners of Gibson's mouth drop and he screams: "I am not him!", stepping away from the wall, away from himself again. 

It's an awkward shriek of someone who's never screamed before in his life, and it ends with a cough and a wince, but Tommy yells back nevertheless, purely in self-defense: "Stop fucking acting like you never were!"

Unlike the older man, Tommy is a competent screamer, roaring through the war and then through the bedroom, surviving by the strength of his lungs alone. 

"I knew him. For a week, I did! Don't you forget that."

"I fell in love with him first," he thinks but doesn't dare to say out loud in any language.

Gibson is walking away from him, still coughing, and it's unfair because he knows Tommy can't catch up, especially with such an uneven pavement under his feet. 

When he is ready to surrender and fall to the ground, face first, Gibson stops and stands completely still, without turning, waiting for him. 

"I want to go home," he whispers when Tommy grabs his shoulder to steady himself. "Screw the hotel, take me home."

"What kind of a fairytale do you think you live in, Thomas?" Alex asks him when he's still packing for the trip. "Do you think you'll just bring him there, to the source, and the spell will get lifted?"

Tommy's hair is blindingly white in the sun, that grey lock right above his eye spreads and spreads when he is in his thirties until the whiteness swallows all but yes, it's the fairytale he still believes in, even though the storyline keeps twisting and turning in a way he's never prepared for. 

"Okay," he agrees, squeezing the man's shoulder. "Home it is."

* * * 

They fuck in their own bed later that night, bodies moving in a flickering orange glow of the bedside lamp, and through the sticky tight friction of it, Tommy accepts Gibson the way he is. Not a work in progress, not a fragmented mess he needs to put together, but a complete man. 

It comes to him, true like a revelation -- and Tommy's had his fair share of those with the cock up his arse because Gibson still communicates the most profound points to him physically, not trusting his voice -- and he accepts it without a fight. 

He digs his forehead into the pillow and his knees into the mattress for balance, overwhelmed by the realization and lets it wash over him, dripping with Gibson's sweat sliding down his arms.

He pushes his arse back onto the cock he's impaled on, rubbing it against the coarse hair down Gibson's groin and purrs and twists in the tight grip of his man's arms around his chest and waist, letting the rhythm carry them away.

Tommy loves it from behind, as it turns outs, purely because it's a perfect reenactment of the wet dreams he used to have in the trenches. The dreams where there was no Gibson's face because he couldn't remember it well no matter how hard he tried.

He comes into the man's hand, sobbing, as a perfect testament that the dreams do come true. And just like in his sleep Gibson follows, kissing and bitting the back of his head. 

Just like in a fairytale, though, nothing good comes without a price. Tommy can bend his bad leg well enough to kneel because it starts to go numb slowly. Beginning with the toes, he loses sensitivity gradually, but steadily, and he knows damn well what it means. The nerves that run through has finally given up on him and started to die off.

He's promised his surgeon to show up immediately in case of persisting tingling, but he's so far behind that point. Now there are entire patches of flesh he can stick a needle into without feeling anything at all. 

And it's a welcome change. He sure as fuck isn't letting them "fix" it. The numbness swallows his limb day by day and the more it happens, the more he dreams of running, just dashing down the road with the wind in his hair like he used to when he was a boy. 

He dreams of the next best thing because now he doesn't have to dream about Gibson anymore.

* * * 

They retire sex when Tommy is pushing his eighth decade with all the honors. 

It's still bloody marvelous in the end, but it takes nearly four hours with Gibson taking a nap atop of him at some point. Then Tommy takes a nap but wakes up just in time, thank god, from his good hip spasming. Arching his back is out of the question and his every attempt of a breathy moan is interrupted by a bout of a barking smoker cough. 

"We had a good run, yeah?" he tells Gibson after they wake up, sticky and barely able to move. 

Gibson kisses the bridge of his nose and doesn't answer.  


Tommy still knows it means "yes." 

He carries all the lube solemnly to the bathroom in the morning and puts a few of his favorite books in the bedside drawer instead. There is a bigger chance for him to get hard from Gibson reading to him, anyway.

* * * 

Alex's oldest's name is Sophie. She and Tommy just get each other from the moment they meet. 

She is soft-spoken like he used to be but attentive, staring everyone up and down with Alex's eyes from under her mother's golden hair. 

She never cries to be picked up or jumps Tommy, just waits for him to lower himself down to the chair and then crawls to his lap carefully, avoiding to put any weight on his bad leg.

Alex has never wanted children, a daughter especially. She is not a woman yet, but she will be, and as much as he'd like to avoid building lasting relationships of any kind with one of those, now he is forced to. 

She senses the chasm between them long before she can articulate it, Tommy can tell. 

"He doesn't hate you," he corrects Sophie once. "He's just skittish, give him time." The girl is three, but she looks at Tommy with all the wisdom of an ancient goddess and nods. 

A decade ticks by with Gibson carrying her on his shoulders and Tommy rocking her to sleep. And she grows and grows, aiming to be as tall as her mother -- a short memory from that summer when Alex went through a local theatre crew like a wildfire, actresses and dancers alike. 

She tells Tommy's jokes and sings Gibson's songs and one summer evening when all four of them go outside to watch the fireworks Tommy looks around and sees her on Alex's shoulders waving her arms excitedly. 

Tommy gets himself properly drunk before going out, so he doesn't run for the bushes with the first explosion of colors hitting the sky, but he is still pretty sure he sees his friend smiling up at her brightly, in a warm, loving way that looks foreign, yet surprisingly natural on his face. 

He and Gibson get asked, especially later in life when they become some a kind of a legendary couple of the local community if they ever wanted to have a child; if there was a missed opportunity. They both agree on a "no". No poor little bastard should be around the caregivers who are falling apart on a constant basis. 

"Sophie will be there for me, with a glass of water on my deathbed," Tommy jokes. 

But years later, she is. 

* * * 

Gibson leaves Tommy's life the way he's come into it. On a cold spring morning, not saying a word. 

Tommy doesn't hold it against him. What he does hold is Gibson's hand, the crooked fingers jumping a little between his own. 

The first stroke takes the older man's voice, this time for good. Tommy just chuckles at the news. Given their entire life together, the good and the bad, it's the least surprising news in existence. 

The second stroke that follows takes his life. It's mercifully fast -- the man was still upright on Monday, on Wednesday they are telling Tommy he'll need another bed since it's not at all likely for Gibson to ever leave it again and then on Friday morning, it looks like what he really needs is a coffin. 

Tommy is squinting really hard to take a good look at the man's head on the pillow, tubes and beeping machines and all, but he can't see much through damn cataracts.

"There's an upside," he keeps telling Gibson while walking into walls, bumping into the furniture and knocking the dishes off the table. "I now can always imagine you young. No need to stare into your shrinking face on a daily basis."

He realizes after a while that he's been rubbing the man's hand continuously in an attempt to warm it up to no avail.

And just like his entire life a nurse is weeping next to him out of pity turning the machines off.

"Don't cry, love," Tommy tells her. "We had a good life." The pain, the darkness of it gets duller and duller with each passing year like all the bad memories tend to do until only the light remains. The words feel soft on his tongue, just like the truth always does.

She leaves him then by his request, and for a few hours, he sits in the room where only his own breathing can be heard, his only mobile leg knocking the awkward rhythm against the wheelchair he's now confined to. 

For decades, deep at night, Tommy is attacked by the paralyzing fear of Gibson succumbing to his never-ending brutal pneumonia, leaving him all alone to face the life.

Now, when it happens, Tommy is eighty-seven, and Gibson is -- was -- eight years his senior. He feels no pain at all. Like a blade of grass that breaks out from under the ground to then decay and die he only feels the sure inevitability of following him. 

"I'm right behind you, my love," he whispers into Gibson's oddly waxy skin and squeezes his hand reassuringly. 

* * * 

"Now you're going to leave me, you old fuck," Alex's distant voice croaks at him from the speakers. Tommy wants to point out Alex is actually three years older but after even the viagra stopped working the man's ego is paper-thin without that. 

"I fucking know you will. You two fucking lovebirds, I've never seen you apart for more than ten minutes."

Tommy doesn't know why the man insists on video calls -- what he can see is a floating blurred circle in a place where Alex's face should be.

It's been four months since they've laid Gibson to rest and the strange lightness still hasn't left Tommy's chest. 

He doesn't feel worse or better. More importantly, he doesn't feel his bad leg anymore and living without it is a real blessing and an old dream came true. He feels content with what he has which is the trait that has helped him to live this long in the first place. 

He can't lie to Alex's face -- to where Alex's face is presumably located -- can't tell him he has another ten years in him. He knows in his heart it's not true at all. 

"I don't like this fucking stupid smile of yours. I'm coming over."

It for sure seems like a cruel joke at the time, but Alex has another daughter after Sophie, no sons, no grandsons or grand-grandsons, either. 

After his eldest sacrifices the big chunk of her own childhood to lure him into the strange, unstable state of loving someone more than himself, caring for his youngest comes naturally to him. 

Mary takes him to live with her for convenience and there, in a big house, surrounded by women he can't get away from by promising to call and then disappearing without a trace, Alex finally finds his peace. 

There is a long pause hanging between them, and then as his home nurse knocks on Tommy's door to call for dinner, Alex suddenly blurts out:

"I love you, Thomas. I've never said it sober in my life, but..."

The call disconnects, and when Alex arrives at Tommy's doorstep with his two granddaughters in tow, he claims he doesn't remember saying that part.

* * * 

"... and then the old fuck just got himself pneumonia," Alex concludes. "Casually as you like, just went to the store and picked himself a deadly diagnosis with a sure outcome..." 

Tommy comes in and out of consciousness, but the rant in his ear feels never-ending. 

Maybe this is hell, he thinks, resigned. Alex still smokes like a chimney, so there is the smell to add to the illusion.

Sophie holds his three-fingered hand. Alex holds the complete one jerking it around empathically as he talks and no matter how hard his daughter tries to wrestle it out of his grip to put it on the covers and give Tommy some peace, he just grabs at it again and refuses to let go. 

Tommy's lungs are filled with fluid, and after pumping it out thrice, they just release him home from the hospital. It's an unpleasant feeling, but now he can truly feel what Gibson has felt for so many times in his life.

He lies, surrounded by the smell of antiseptic, cigarettes, Sophie's and his nurse's perfume's battling in his nostrils. Tommy has always been extremely sensitive to smells, after the darkness of the trenches when his life has depended on it, and after becoming nearly blind, it reached an almost supernatural level. 

He swears he can feel the lingering smell of Gibson's skin still in the air, his hair, still so thick until his last day on Earth, his sweat. He takes the deepest breath he can and as it fills him his face relaxes into a smile. 

Then the voices blur into a dense hum around him, and the dark pink of the inside of his eyelids starts to lighten as the sky lightens at dawn. 

* * * 

Tommy looks up at the pale blue sky above, then down at himself, dressed in his best suit from 1960ies. The body he is in is young. More importantly, it can stand upright. It can see and breathe again. 

He stands on the beach but while in life neither he nor Gibson has gathered the courage to go to Dunkirk again, here he is, and he feels no fear, no impending danger. 

It's a warm sunny day, and the waves are whispering to him as they wash across the shore. Tommy takes out the cigarette from his pocket, lights it up. Does it quick with all of his fingers in place. He can feel the taste of it, although it's a bit muffled like it's a memory of a flavor instead of the flavor itself. 

He turns his head to the right and there, at the distance a man stands, waving, the man Tommy can recognize from miles away.

Tommy realizes then that the feeling of calm certainty he's lived with since they've separated didn't go anywhere. It is still there, in his chest, so warm, spreading through the flesh, settling where his heartbeat used to be. 

He curses and throws the cigarette butt to the ground -- whatever this place is, foul language and littering are allowed, surprisingly -- he is almost six months late.

As the man starts running to him, Tommy runs, too. It feels good, the motion, the wind on his face -- he hasn't run for decades, but his body takes over carrying him forward before any doubts can slip into his mind.

They collide in an embrace. The warmth under their ribs expands and engulfs them both.


End file.
